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Liam Karlsson had no clue why his SEO clients were losing traffic while rankings held

Then his 57-year-old mom asked ChatGPT for new running shoes

Nike answer. Bought the shoe. Was super happy. 

Google was never part of that customer journey...

That was the seed of Rankad.ai

He pitched Co-Founder William Gyltman. They went all in

Track and grow brand visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. 

...

Amazon sellers do not have a data problem.

They have a decision problem.

They already have the clicks
The conversions
The impressions
The keyword history

What they do not have is a system that knows what to do with it.

So brands pay agencies $5,000 to $50,000 a month - and still lose money on ads

Matthew Chen built Laurence to change that.

A quantitative system for Amazon advertising.
Built for continuous decision-making under profit constraints.
Using existing ad copy, reinforcement learning, and custom...

Construction doesn't fail on the jobsite. It fails in the drawings. The jobsite just reveals it

Project managers spend half their time scanning plans page by page for conflicts between disciplines. Plumbing through steel beams. Electrical into HVAC

They still miss most of it. Millions in rework when caught in the field

Milind Sagaram built Articulate to catch these issues before construction starts

AI reads the PDFs. Finds clashes across architectural, structural, and MEP sheets. Generates draft issue reports automatically

The surprise: construction teams aren't resistant. They want it...

Agents don’t need bigger models. They need better tools.

Morph trains coding subagents.
Not for humans. For frontier models.

Fast Apply edits at 10,000 tokens/sec.
WarpGrep handles code and log search.

Both keep the main model’s context clean

Because when context gets too large, performance drops.

Now Morph is pushing coding subagents even faster.

One newer model runs at 33,000 tokens/sec: https://docs.morphllm.com/sdk/components/compact

🎙️ Tejas Bhakta, Founder & CEO, Morph

01:30 Fast Apply + WarpGrep<...

Pamir Ehsas spent years as outside counsel serving startups. 

He saw the same problem on repeat

Simple legal work took weeks. Pricing was opaque. Lawyers kept starting from scratch instead of using AI

So he built Arcline. 

AI generates the first draft. Elite lawyers from the best firms, and schools (Harvard, Oxford etc.) do the final revision

Up to 80% of the work gone. Same-day turnaround (Try getting that from a traditional law firm) 

<...

An employee used his corporate Gemini account to generate fake receipts for reimbursements

Not because he was lying. He just didn't have the real ones

That's when the CISO realized they needed Oximy

Ask an enterprise how many AI tools they use. They say 10. The real number is probably 40+

Most of the risk isn't malicious. People just want to get things done faster. So customer lists end up on free tools with no DPA

The first instinct is to block everything. But people bypass restrictions anyway

The...

Attorneys are trained to spot issues. That’s literally what law school teaches.

Show them your product, and the first thing they’ll say is: “the margin is off on this.”

Every hour they spend learning software is an hour they’re not billing.

Raffi Isanians knows that because he lived it.
Kirkland. Gunderson. Years inside private equity and venture work.

That’s why Mage Legal has a simple standard: if a lawyer opens the product with no instructions and can’t figure it out, "we’re failing"

Comprehensive AI...

The internet was the training set for intelligence

Nobody has built the equivalent for the physical world

Previously, Lucas Ngoo co-founded Carousell, scaled it past $1B 

Now at Cortex AI he's collecting the data robotics labs need to train foundation models

Cameras, VR headsets, glasses on factory workers, retail workers, everyday people. Recording real-world manipulation work (Maybe tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of hours)

Not building the robot. Not training the model. Collecting what goes in

2026: scale data in a big way 
2027+: start rolling ro...

Some hotel software is still DOS-based. Sometimes pen and paper (that's why guests are waiting 45 mins to get towels)

Gavin's dad has worked at Marriott for the last nine years. When he showed Gavin the old software, that was the spark

Lance builds AI agents that answer calls, handle back office operations, run sales workflows & more

Started with voice, got inside the hotels, and realized how much more they could automate

With coding agents one engineer acts like five

Big contracts need custom solutions. Now they can deliver

Direct sales reply rates are going down. AI spam is making it worse

Nikhil Reddy saw the shift early: as trust matters more, partnerships become a real revenue channel

Problem is most partnership teams are still running on spreadsheets. They don't know where to focus. Attribution across emails, events, and co-marketing is a mess

Arzule uses CRM data, market signals, and ecosystem signals to help partnership teams discover and prioritize the partnerships that actually drive revenue

Two people building it. Already working with companies generating over $400M in ARR

...

Setting up a single trigger in Zendesk takes 30 clicks

With Pillar it takes one sentence

JJ Maxwell built an open source copilot you build into your app. Users talk to it in natural language and it drives the app for them

The problem: products can do a lot but users don't always know what's there. So they ask support. Or they churn

Before Pillar, JJ built a creator ad marketplace with about 40,000 creators. Then spent two years on another product through YC W24. About $30M on the platform, real users, decent...

The script has been the same for decades: find a co-founder

Investors demanded it.
Accelerators screened for it.

The narrative became so entrenched that founders started pairing up out of obligation, not alignment.

Julian Weisser, founder of SOLO and ODF, has a name for this phenomenon: co-founders of convenience

And he's proving they're not just unnecessary-they're often the reason companies fail.

This week, Julian released 'The State of Solo Founding' report: "Today, solo founding is considered odd. Soon it will be the default. This report features exclusive Carta...

Nate Matherson has spent 10+ years as a founder. He's built companies and even exited. After that first exit, he started angel investing in dozens of companies, then launched a fund.

Numeral was one of his early bets. He sent Numeral's CEO Sam an email. By the end of the day, he was working there as Head of Growth. Now he's helping scale the YC-backed sales tax platform serving over 2,000 customers.

Nate's seen what happens when founders don't think about sales tax. "They actually found out that they owed about a half million dollars in sales...

Jayden Clark didn’t abandon music. He re-scored it for distribution. 

After music school, a hedge fund tour, and a B2B SaaS sprint, he launched MOTS—short, sharp episodes designed to be both of the moment and built to last a quarter. 

His north star isn’t “go viral.” It’s “be clear.”

The insight is disarmingly pragmatic: structure is not the enemy of creativity—it’s the amplifier. Lists compress cognition. 

A beginning–build–end gives every clip a runway and a landing. 

When a five-replies-deep roast on X unexpectedly detonated...

Sky Yang (CEO) & Neo Lee (CTO) are Co-founders of Imagine AI, an AI-powered content engine that clones B2B founders—replicating their voice, context, and backstory to create scalable personal brands. Before Imagine AI, Sky was elected student body president at UCSD by 32,000 students at age 19, then secured $150 million in state funding for university housing through coalition-building and advocacy in DC, Sacramento and at the UC Board of Regents. He co-founded "Break the Outbreak," a nonprofit that delivered PPE across 18 states and 53 cities during COVID, earning commendations from Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Eric Swalwell. Neo transferred from UCSD to...

Rebecca Medina and Jeff Phillips built an AI-powered talent marketplace that's disrupting recruitment with transparent pricing, direct negotiation, and same-day PM hires for SMBs.

Rebecca Medina had the network. She had decades of Big Tech experience. She had the credibility. But when she needed project management help on a client engagement as an independent consultant, none of it mattered.

"Even with my network of project managers, I couldn't find the right person fast enough," Rebecca recalls. "And it created a big problem for the company because we weren't able to scale as quickly as we...

Julian Weisser is the Founder and CEO of Solo Founders, a three-month residency program in San Francisco where founders live and work together while maintaining full authorship of their companies. He's also the CEO of On Deck Founders (ODF), a program that over seven years and 26 cohorts has helped over 1,000 people start companies that have collectively raised more than $2 billion. 

As an angel investor with more than 150 portfolio companies including Levels, Astroforge, and MagicSchool, he's seen patterns in what actually predicts startup success versus what investors claim they're looking for. He writes the Texts with Founders newsletter s...

Allen Naliath is the Founder and CEO of Friday, a Chrome extension that integrates AI email management directly into Gmail. Two years ago at Stanford, he struggled with the confidence to ask for what he wanted. So he engineered a solution: a 30-day rejection challenge where he had to hear "no" once per day or start to ask for increasingly audacious requests. The problem: people kept saying yes. He escalated strategically—waiting by a golf cart to ask Sam Altman to sign his laptop, and cold-asking Garry Tan to add him on LinkedIn during a Stanford talk. Garry's response: "Is...

Lindsay Amos is the Founder of Amos Communications, a boutique firm for founder-led marketing and PR. From 2018 to 2024, she ran communications at Y Combinator, where she coached thousands of startups and wrote YC's handbook on startup PR. Before that, she worked in comms at Square and Meta, giving her a 360° view of how stories move from boardrooms to bylines to buyer behavior. Today, she advises founders on landing real news (not ads), building durable founder brands, and operating across a media landscape that's shifted from legacy gatekeepers to creator-led growth channels. She also co-created The To-Do List Summit, a w...

Joe Holberg is the Founder & former CEO of Spring, a workplace financial wellness platform that began D2C, pivoted to employer-paid, and became a top-rated U.S. offering for three consecutive years, serving 25,000+ users. He bootstrapped from 2015 to 2018, raised a $1M seed, and sold Spring to Mariner Wealth Advisors in 2023, remaining through early 2025. Before Spring, he taught with AmeriCorps on Chicago’s West Side and built CS education at Google. A first-generation college graduate who once slept in his car to finish school, Joe is now a declared candidate for the 58th Mayor of Chicago.

Holberg’s cata...

Jay Ram is Founder & CEO of Hud, the evaluation and RL platform for AI agents. Hud helps startups build RL environments, run fast reward loops, and plug into any RL backend—so teams can cut costs and push last-mile accuracy once they've hit PMF. Before Hud, Jay left a lucrative quant career, shipped an AI prank-calling app that briefly hit #1 on the App Store (≈500k calls), and decided he wanted harder problems and smarter customers. He's a YC W25 alum; Hud is already used by researchers at foundation labs and is expanding into enterprise environments.

Jay's catalyst was...

Kevin Xu is Founder & CEO of Alpha AI, your “AI money friend” that plugs into real-time markets and your portfolio to explain what just happened—and what matters next—inside a simple chat. Before Alpha, Kevin became a WallStreetBets folk hero as turning $35K in a 401(k) into $10M through high-conviction swing trades. He previously founded Fan Hero (YC S13), worked at Stripe (~#300) and Google/YouTube, and appeared in MSNBC Studios’ Diamond Hands on Peacock.

Kevin’s catalyst was realizing the products he loved—Google, Wikipedia—were built by real people. That sent him to YC, then Stripe for world...

Daivik Goel is Co-founder & CEO of Shor, a global payroll platform for startups. Traditional EOR providers charge around $7,000 per year to manage an employee earning $20,000 per year. Shor uses automation to reduce costs and embeds payroll actions into Slack and WhatsApp through AI agents, so founders can request tax documents or payment updates without opening another dashboard.

Daivik and co-founder Avi Konduru submitted their YC application at 7:59 PM, one minute before the deadline. After multiple prior rejections, they got an interview, then a follow-up call, then acceptance. They started YC with a crypto payment idea, pivoted five...

Cody Schneider is the Founder & CEO of Graphed, an AI agent for marketing analytics. Graphed plugs into common data sources, manages the data warehouse, and lets marketers chat with their data to generate on-demand visuals—“stacked bar of new vs. total users week over week,” “add a line of best fit,” and similar prompts. It’s built to handle scale (Cody mentions onboarding ~25M rows of Facebook data) and to avoid rate limits and sluggish queries by owning the warehousing layer.

In this episode, Cody outlines a practical path from data sprawl to decisions: skip steep BI learning cur...

Craig Lewis is the Founder & CEO Ogentic AI, builder of Zing—an AI-native enterprise browser that turns intent → action in a secure, workflow-native workspace. Before Ogentic, he founded Gig Wage (750k contractors paid, ~$1B moved, $25M+ raised) and learned payroll inside ADP. That operator muscle fuels Ogentic’s pace: incorporated in June, alpha in July, beta in August. He also serves on the governing board at MassChallenge and angels actively.

In this episode, Craig shares velocity advice like: ship before perfect (feedback > stealth), build pro-human AI (human-in-the-loop), and treat fundraising like sales (expect 19 no’s, optimize investor–founder fi...

Grace Gong is the Founder & CEO of Smart Venture Media, podcast host, angel investor, and author. She’s interviewed 500+ founders, investors, and operators on her podcasts, then parlayed that network into a high-signal community: curated founder–VC dinners, conferences (including the Smart AI Summit), and rooms where intros turn into customers and checks. The flywheel started during the pandemic with 5 pm Friday Zooms—and evolved into tightly curated IRL events supported by sponsors and operators.

In this episode, Grace outlines a practical approach to community-building: curate for outcomes, not optics (every seat should benefit from every other seat...

Collin Wallace is a partner at Lobby Capital with 20+ years as an engineer, inventor, operator, and investor. Before Lobby, he was Managing Director of Techstars Silicon Valley, launching the first two Bay Area accelerator programs with JPMorgan and eBay. He founded FanGo (Techstars S10)—acquired by Grubhub in 2011, where he became Head of Innovation (OrderHub + pre-IPO patents)—and later co-founded ZeroStorefront (YC W19), acquired by Thanx in 2022. Collin advises the Roelof Botha & Huifen Chan Innovation Program, co-teaches Startup Garage at Stanford GSB, has run two YC Demo Day Funds, and has invested in 80+ startups (e.g., Payjoy, Landed, Mosaic Voic...

Alessandro Chesser is the founder and CEO of Dynasty, a startup focused on making Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) trust stacking accessible to founders. Before launching Dynasty, he led sales at Carta from the early days to roughly $300M in ARR, gaining hands-on insight into equity workflows, 409A dynamics, and how distribution is built around real, recurring needs. Dynasty offers a subscription service—$1,500 per year for up to four family trusts—that includes trust creation, annual administration, and tax return filing, turning a traditionally bespoke, high-cost process into something founders can set up early in their journey.

In t...

Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin is a co-founder of Sky Mavis, the team behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin blockchain. At the forefront of Web3's most groundbreaking experiments, Jeff helped transform Axie from a small crypto-native community into a cultural phenomenon that onboarded millions to blockchain technology. With over $4 billion in NFT trading volume - earning a Guinness World Record - Axie didn't just talk about bringing people to crypto; it actually did it. Beyond Axie, Jeff pioneered the Ronin blockchain, which now hosts 70+ games and has proven that purpose-built infrastructure can unlock exponential growth for crypto applications.

I...

Parthi Loganathan is the founder and CEO of Letterdrop, a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps B2B companies build pipeline by focusing on the warmest leads and people who are actually in market. Since launching Letterdrop, he's helped companies move beyond saturated email and cold calling tactics to identify prospects who want to talk and send them highly tailored messaging. The platform analyzes public conversations, CRM data, and sales calls to segment buyers and enable personalized outreach without relying on high-volume approaches.

In this episode, we explore the fundamental shift happening in B2B sales as...

In this episode, I sat down with John Paul Mussalli, the co-founder and COO of CareSwift, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-powered software to streamline documentation for EMT workers. 

JP and his cofounders brings a unique blend of technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive to the healthcare technology space, having previously worked across diverse fields from real estate automation to web development. 

Since co-founding CareSwift, he's helped scale the platform to serve over 2,000 EMTs in New York City alone, generating more than 90,000 automated reports. Beyond product development, JP leads go-to-market strategy and is currently pursuing EMT ce...

Reuben Torenberg is a Senior Vice President at CBRE, the world's largest commercial real estate services firm. Reuben specializes in helping startups in San Francisco navigate the complex and rapidly changing office leasing landscape. Since joining CBRE in 2014, he's represented some of the biggest names in tech - including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, and Dropbox - and is widely known as the go-to broker for early-stage startups and growth-stage companies alike. Beyond real estate, Reuben is also a community builder, having founded SF Hoops and SF Links, two of the city's most exclusive and founder-heavy social sports leagues.

...

Stephen Llevano is the founder and CEO of Capabuild, a software platform designed for restoration contractors who work on insurance jobs. Capabuild helps these businesses manage compliance, streamline field documentation, and create accurate estimates — fast.

In this episode, Stephen shares the full story behind Capabuild: how it started, what he got wrong early on, and the key insights that helped turn it into a real business.

One of the biggest takeaways? The power of watching customers work in their real environment — instead of relying on what they say they need.

We dive into...

Jake Wedig is the Director of Tax at Fondo, where he helps startups navigate complex tax legislation and maximize their tax benefits. With deep expertise in startup tax strategy, Jake specializes in R&D tax credits, Section 174 compliance, and helping growing companies optimize their tax positions while managing cash flow challenges.

In this conversation, Jake breaks down the recent changes in tax legislation that every startup founder needs to know about, particularly the game-changing provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill and how startups can leverage R&D tax credits to get substantial cash back on their...

Nathan Latka is the founder and CEO of Founderpath, a fintech platform that has deployed nearly $200 million in non-dilutive capital to 500+ software companies. He’s also the creator of GetLatka, a massive SaaS database built off the back of his top-ranked Latka podcast, where he’s interviewed thousands of founders. Nathan’s entrepreneurial journey began at 18 with the launch of Heyo, a Facebook fan page SaaS tool he bootstrapped to $2M in ARR before raising venture capital and eventually exiting.

In this conversation, Nathan shares hard-earned lessons from building and exiting companies, explains why most founders don’t unders...

Ajith Govind and Avinash Joshi are the co-founders of Cactus, an AI copilot for solopreneurs such as private chefs and caterers, helping them streamline admin tasks and grow their business. Brian Kuan, Community Manager at Vanta, hosted the conversation. Together, we explore early-stage sales, building trust, and the YC network's unique power to catalyze startup momentum. In this episode, we discuss:

Reuben Torenberg is a First Vice President at CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm. Reuben specializes in helping startups in San Francisco navigate the complex and rapidly changing office leasing landscape. Since joining CBRE in 2014, he's represented some of the biggest names in tech — including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, and Dropbox — and is widely known as the go-to broker for early-stage startups and growth-stage companies alike. Beyond real estate, Reuben is also a community builder, having founded SF Hoops and SF Links, two of the city’s most exclusive and founder-heavy social sports leagues.

In this...

Roger Dickey is a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor with over 130 startup investments under his belt. From humble beginnings coding games as a kid to building Mafia Wars at Zynga—a game that reached a $300 million annual run rate—Roger has scaled multiple companies and exited to giants like Zynga, Home Depot, and private equity. He's also pioneered the "search lab" approach to company building, a structured yet high-velocity process for launching and validating startup ideas. In this episode, we cover:

Travis Hedge is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Vouch, an insurance platform purpose-built for high-growth technology companies. After growing up around a family-owned insurance agency in Columbus, Ohio, Travis spent his early career at Nationwide Insurance and SVB Capital, where he saw firsthand the gaps in insurance for startups. He co-founded Vouch in 2018, and in just a few years, the company has scaled to nearly 6,000 customers. In our conversation, we dive into:

Roy Lee is the 21-year-old founder and CEO of Interview Coder a breakout startup that has taken the internet by storm. In one year, Roy went from having his Harvard acceptance rescinded to building an AI tool used by thousands of aspiring developers to land jobs at companies like Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. His story — marked by risk-taking, resilience, and relentless building — has captivated millions on social media and sparked a firestorm of controversy in academia and Big Tech alike.

In this episode, we cover: